Under a bright blue sky we couldn't help but comparing to that distant Tuesday, my girlfriend and I walked through Boston yesterday, from the T station across the Common, through the throngs of people sunning and playing frisbee, past the arepas vendors and t-shirt stands, across to the Public Garden, with its families spreading out lunch and swan-boat tours gliding into the blue water, where we headed toward Arlington Street and finally to the 9/11 Memorial.
A clutch of police stood to the side of the semi-circular, low stone monument bearing the names of the 200 state residents who perished that day. Bouquets, and cards and photographs and children's drawings, adorned the cement in front of it. We dutifully moved out of the way as a woman came through to add her own flowers. Beyond the memorial, on a small plot of grass with a newly-planted tree in the middle, were nearly 3,000 short American flags, placed in the turf that morning.
We spent a good while by those flags. One does not suspend honesty in the face of remembrance. Any single flag was a small, humble scrap of fabric on stubby wooden pole--hardly "banners," to be sure. But collectively they imparted much more, three thousand flags curving and flapping with each light breeze, like leaves rustling on tree branches. Their black shadows shifted and fluttered across the grass, the shadows of paper cranes. The stillness and immutability of death each flag represented belied by this: they looked ready to take off.
Social-psychology research shows that even for "flashbulb" events like that of 9/11, our memories dissolve just as much as they do for mundane happenings. As we walked, we found it healing to fill in the details of the day. We moved through some of the past week's stories, invariably featuring tales of heroes--the financial-firm security guard who seamlessly ushered hundreds of staff out, only to turn around and go back upstairs to check for anyone left behind ... the fighter pilot who boarded an F-16, loaded only with blanks because it had just returned from a training run, prepared for a kamikaze mission should one of the hijacked planes approach D.C. ... the imperishable coordination of the United 93 passengers, for which we have at minimum an untouched Capitol to thank them for. To recount, correct, fill in gaps was both minor and major.
We also shared our dark associations: the cringe when seeing jets take their routine but low flight paths over cities, the slight stop in the throat when boarding a plane. All traumas leave scars, the scars always persist through such associations. Our national consciousness has suffered much disunity in the years since 9/11, but at a biological level, in our collective cringes and twinges, we will be united probably forever.
We are also perpetually united in this: it could have been any of us. This attack that targeted civilian populations, and indeed was partially undercut by the very civilians on Flight 93. September 11 memorials are unique among our heritage in that they honor fellow civilians. Each flag in the Public Garden exalted a regular individual. In those stubby banner-ettes we saw our peers, buried somewhere or reduced to ashes, yet somehow greater in death. Each remembrance that evoked an individual moment of bravery, by those dead to say nothing of by those thousands of living rescuers and responders, seem to transform our negative heritage into something positive, something unifying, something, indeed, very much worth caring about.
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